NAN DISAPPEARS
Cherry’s mother had not crossed the threshold of her son’s house since
that unfortunate day when she had ventured over it on hearing that
little Ted, the fifth infant that had progressed towards heaven _via_
infant’s diarrhoea, was almost at the journey’s end. It was fourteen
years ago, this very month, since she had opened the door, proceeded
into the kitchen with a smile, spoken a few gentle words--and found
something spring on her, push her out of the house, with her hair down
her back.
Her only connection with the house of the unlucky number since then,
was the frail link of sending Polly a birthday card. Never once had
she omitted that. She had apparently only just realised that Polly was
growing up, having this last time changed the card with bird, flower,
or child nursing an animal in its lap, for--a book, namely, Doctor
Kirton’s “Happy Homes and How to Make Them,” of which Polly deemed only
the chapter on “Courtship” as worthy of giggling interest.
On a certain sunny day in summer, Cherry went on his wheels to see his
mother, and--to be cried over. He found her greatly changed.
For the first time he heard her give instructions as to where and
how she should be buried, allotting her blue willow dinner service
to Polly, along with her gold ear-rings. Cherry returned through the
streets with a desolate feeling upon him. His repressed emotions
resolved themselves into a determined vow to bridge over the quarrel
between Nan and his mother, or die in the attempt.
Cherry had progressed during the past weeks.
He was becoming an adept in the game of bluff, even of self-bluff. With
life turned to ashes and the journey up a steep road “winding him,” he
assured people that he was in the pink, and more than that--lived up to
it. If he collapsed, he collapsed when no one saw him.
Every evening, dog-tired, he came home to the grind of the everlasting
sewing-machine, and Southey’s Life set itself to the rhythm of that
steady grind.
The outward expression of this struggle he had begun showed itself only
in faint horizontal lines above the bridge of the nose.
Through it all, he coloured the pipe Granny had given him. It was now a
golden tint.
Nan had said she could do with some one to “clean.”
Cherry suggested Jane, the sand-hawker’s wife.
In some peculiar way he looked on the time he had first seen Jane, as
the waking of his real desire to grip Life again. Jane, apologising for
Tim’s giving her the black eye, had made Cherry blush, though he knew
that on every single occasion when he had struck Nan, she had asked for
it.
Nan was a little jealous of Jane.
Jane was very free of speech.
“Life’s a funny thing,” Jane had said on one occasion, leaning on the
handle of her brush. “Look at him an’ me, now! Wasn’t we just cut out
for each other. But God didn’t see it.”
Her earnestness, and Nan’s look, made comic opera for the man sat in
the corner.
He had got back, by the persistent game of self-bluff, a half-baked
humour and courage that helped him through these rough days of transit.
There was upon him, each day, a new wonder, when Nan did not have an
outburst. But he did not deceive himself. Nan was only holding herself
in.
Beside using his brains to placate Nan, it cost him quite a penny in
trash jewellery and blouses. He was as conscious of having to use
strategic cunning as a statesman walking on the brink of a revolution.
Sometimes, he believed there was an almost imperceptible change in Nan
since the night of the three knocks, which she had since found out
coincided with the night of Lizzie’s repentant passing-on. Nan had
always been superstitious. Moreover, she was reading the tracts which
the hounder of his immortal soul was still sending to Cherry. She read
them chiefly for lack of something else to read. Cherry took a glance
at them once. Then, he did not wonder at the link between Nan and the
tracts. They were written for crude souls--humourless souls, capable of
believing in and making hells. The local colouring was melodramatic.
The soul-queries were pointed. The positivism was like a load of bricks.
Business had brought out in Nan some qualities that surprised him.
“You don’t know a chap till you live with him, an’ then it’s too late,”
was one of Granny’s sayings. “An’ you don’t know a woman when you do.”
Cherry believed it as he saw the furious vigour with which Nan ran the
sewing-machine.
She would work hours at a stretch, without food--when another woman
would have fainted.
She might have discovered a North Pole by her single virtue of savage
persistency. But she was built all wrong for a little house, the
mothering of a foolish girl, and--the coddling of a broken man.
Sometimes, in his most devitalised moments, Cherry wondered if anything
could ever happen that would make Nan “coddle” him. The idea would make
him smile.
He was pondering now on whether to acquaint Nan with his being about to
invite his mother to Sunday tea. He could not think clearly, on this
evening. He was too tired, he, who had never been used to “that tired
feeling”--who had laughed at newspaper advertisements showing people
with tragic faces and those word printed under.
Polly had joined a Cookery Class. She had bought a real cook’s apron
and had it on at this moment, with a real cook’s expression. Nan was
finishing her bit of hemming at the machine. Plates were warming. The
house had a drowsy, good-night look creeping upon it.
When, into its peace, came little Rob, and Rob’s mother.
The look on her face as she came forwards into the light told that
something unusual had happened.
“Oh----” said Nan in surprise, getting up from the machine. Then, “Had
you forgotten his little sleeping-shawl? It’s there, aired?”
“Nay, I’ve another at home for him,” said Rob’s mother.
Her voice trembled.
Little Rob ran from his mother to Nan.
“Well, you see, Mrs. Cherry----” began the woman in the shawl,
hesitatingly.
“You can say what you have to say without ‘Missus’,” remarked Nan. “I
don’t need a title.”
The postman had once informed Nan that “missus” was a title. She never
forgot to throw it out in irony, at Cherry.
“Well----” said the abashed little mother again.
Nan lost control.
She set her hands on her hips.
“How many wells make a river?” she asked.
She was preparing herself for something now, a suspicion that was
coming to her, with insulting force. Cherry and Polly both felt it, too.
“Well,” said Rob’s mother again, “it’s a long way to carry him. I’m
fleyed on him takin’ cowd. An’ a woman ’as lives by me, she says----”
The look on Nan’s face stopped her further utterance.
A dead silence fell on the kitchen.
“Jesus wept!” said the shrew, in a way Cherry had never heard her say
it before. “Tha’rt takin’ him away!”
Then she re-iterated, fiercely, “Takin’ him away from me!”
Rob stared at his foster-mother.
Then from her to his own parent.
He began to blub.
Nan picked the child up roughly.
The colour had left even her lips.
As Rob’s mother said afterwards, you could see she was a “bad un” for
she went white. Red anger was the sign of wholesome anger that would
stop short of murder, in Narrowfields.
Beside the round rosiness of the child’s face Nan’s looked now
corpse-like, save for the two live coals of her black eyes.
She held the golden-headed lad a little way off from her, with a look
of an inquisitioner on her face.
“Has Mammy Cherry ever done aught wrong to _thee_?” she queried, with a
strange emphasis.
Little Rob could not understand it at all.
He blubbed louder than ever.
“My God!” said Nan, shrilly. “I’ve treated that child better nor if
he’d bin my own. May I drop dead just here where I stand if that’s not
true.”
She stood Amazon-like, waiting for Providence to strike her, then when
it did not--she turned upon Rob’s mother a look under which women
made of sterner stuff would have quailed. Rob’s mother lost her head
entirely under it. She began to cry. Whilst out of the tears came
divers excuses, each one contradicting the last.
It was at this moment that Cherry chipped in.
He took out the colouring pipe and laid it on the boiler, then spoke
with the male’s deliberation.
“Nan, if she wants to take him away--let her,” he said, quietly.
“There’s no law against it. But she doesn’t need to lie about it. We
shan’t eat her.”
Then--Rob’s mother broke into open confession.
“Somebody” had told her that Nan would thump the child. She had been so
uneasy she could scarcely mind her work. So she had come to take him
away.
Nan set the boy down on his feet.
She turned, and without a word began to gather up his toys--the doll
she had made from shirt-clippings, the woolly baa-lamb drawing a yellow
cart, the counting beads Cherry had bought. She wrapped these up in the
sleeping-shawl, parcelled all up, and--the door closed behind little
Rob, leaving in the house a big, lonely hole that had not been there
before.
The remarkable feature in the whole thing was that Nan set up no
defence.
For two whole days she went about in the same utter silence with which
she had heard why little Rob was being taken away. If it was pride
that smouldered in the depths of her eyes, it was a Lucifer-like pride
unlike that of ordinary womanhood. As she did her doorstep she looked
up and down the little street with a look that made any woman meeting
it go in suddenly--excepting an old Irishwoman, who “stared her out.”
She took down the card that said she made shirts and working aprons.
Those she had not finished, she left unfinished, and told folk they
would not get, without any explanation.
Nan was on strike.
On the third night she went off, without saying where she was going.
Tanner Fold, Cherry guessed. But her return did not coincide with the
time the Tanner Fold journey would take. The look she had gone out
with was intensified. Her silence, however, had broken. She yapped out
staccato replies to Cherry. But she did not begin to sew again, as
partner in the “business.”
On the next night she went off again, at the same time. As she put on
her hat before the glass, Cherry said, mildly, “Look here, Nan. I’m not
a jealous man. But if I catch any other chap fool enough to go round
with them feather’s o’ thine----” He broke off there, and began to
whistle “Good-bye, don’t sigh, you’ll be an angel by and by.”
Nan gave him a queer look.
“Tha needn’t be jealous o’ him I go out wi’,” she said. And went off
sharp.
Cherry looked at Polly.
She was sitting on the end of the fender reading “Lancashire Cookery
Book,” and cooking things gloriously in her imagination.
Nan came in again at the identical time she had previously returned. To
the tick, Cherry summed it up.
He was puzzled.
She had not been drinking.
Nan had finished drinking as soon as she begun, after that one glorious
headache, after her round with Lizzie. Nan didn’t believe in hurting
herself.
It had been pouring with rain.
Yet--the feathers were not out of curl.
But he said nothing.
“Where’s our Polly?” she asked.
A faint astonishment fell on Cherry. “Our Polly” was tame, indeed, for
the shrew.
Nan appeared to catch it in the glance of his eye.
“Just run out for a breather,” he told her.
“Th’ bitch is allus out,” she said in something like her usual tones.
Cherry had sent Polly out with the momentous letter asking Grandma
Cherry to tea on Sunday.
By now it would have dropped into the box.
He almost wished he had not sent it.
But this was too much like dallying as he had dallied fourteen years,
letting that old trouble harden until now it would need a pickaxe to
break into it and demolish it.
Cherry went about his business and came home at his usual times.
He had experienced these silences of Nan’s for longer than he cared
to count. But there was something different in this one, something he
could not classify.
“If tha wants another kid to noss,” he said once, “I can get thee one
at a place I call at.”
Her face expressed scarlet rage at the idea.
She expressed the fact that she wanted no kid, with language that made
Cherry realise his mistake, without altering his deduction.
Then the same silence fell again.
On the Friday Nan set to and cleaned with unusual vim. On Saturday
night she was out once more, coming in with the same sort of look,
coupled with a deep dejection. Cherry himself was feeling bad. Those
nerves in his left stump of a leg were giving him jip. Polly had
received another letter from Bob Wild and was busy writing one back.
“This street,” said Nan, whilst making supper, “wants wiping off the
face o’ th’ earth.”
From which sentence Cherry came to the conclusion that his first
deduction had been a right one. Nan looked on herself as having been
robbed of the child she had nursed, by the street. She was as wild as a
she-bear robbed of its cub.
On the Sunday morning a soft rapping at the door.
Polly went.
“Why, it’s little Rob,” she called.
“Mammy Cherry,” called Rob’s voice, “Wob’s got some new pip-pips on.
White pip-pips.”
“What have I to do?” called Polly, helplessly. Then, “He’s coming in.
Ooo!”
Rob walked in sedately, hands in his pockets, his eyes proudly on the
white slippers.
“Hello!” he said, peeping in on them at the doorway of the kitchen. He
nodded his curly head. Then he strutted in.
“Wob’s got white bitches,” he observed, standing by Nan’s chair.
He looked like a new sort of angel with a Dan Leno seriousness that was
irresistible.
His blue eyes gazed up in puzzled wonder at Mammy Cherry.
She did not look at him.
“Wob’s got white bitches,” he repeated, looking up at her. She did not
look down at him.
“New w-white b-bitches!” he said, his lip beginning to wobble,
and putting his hands in his pocket once more, he advanced to the
hearthstone, turned his back to the fire, and mimicked “man,” all the
time looking to see Mammy Cherry look back at him.
Nan did not look at him.
Quite suddenly, he burst into tears, and ran and clutched her apron.
“Run home,” said Nan suddenly, looking down at him “Run home. I’m not
fit to be trusted, I’m not.”
Rob’s crying stopped. He had caught a word that reminded him of
something. He put his hands in his pockets again, returned to the
hearthstone, and observed with the man-like attitude of back to the
fire, “Not fit to tust.”
He repeated what he had overheard in connection with Nan like a parrot,
and with blue eyes fixed on Nan. Perhaps, he thought, that would make
Mammy Cherry laugh.
“Put him outside,” said Nan, to Polly.
Polly took the child.
Struggling and kicking he was carried out. On the threshold she
gave him a tiny kiss and--a big chocolate drop from her pocket.
Then--gently, and almost with tears, she closed the door. Rob sat
down on the doorstep. At intervals they heard his voice come up the
passage, sometimes dolefully, sometimes hopefully.
“Wob wants to come in----”
“New white bitches----”
“Oppey door, Mammy Cherry----”
“Wob’ll punch th’ door----”
“Oppey door, Daddy Cherry----” (this as a last resource).
“Wob wants to come in----”
Then there was a long silence.
After which--the door gave that noise which doors give in response to a
kick. It was Rob’s last word.
Cherry looked across at Nan.
“Little devil!” she said, and burst out laughing.
She had spoken the words as affectionately as other women used
“darling” or “pet.”
And for a moment, meeting Cherry’s eye, she was startled, for fear she
had given herself away.
To cover her tracks she was yapping all morning.
Apparently, she was quite normal, and there was no sign of the squall
coming down, as they sat at the tea-table. Cherry was waiting for his
mother’s knock. It came at length. So tremulous and feeble was the
sound of it that Nan might well be suspicious that it was Rob come back
again. Polly went.
Cherry felt sick.
Suppose Nan burst out again whilst his mother was here.
He was really in a funk.
Suppose Nan started where they had left off fourteen years ago! He
would have to sit there and----
“Ooo!” came Polly’s astonished voice. Then, “Come in, Grandma.”
Nan looked at Cherry.
He did not look at her.
But he felt her look and all it boded.
There was a little pause.
“I’ll come in if I’m welcome,” said the gentle voice outside, with
dignity.
Cherry mastered his chaotic fears.
“Welcome as flowers in May, mother,” he called.
He tried to make his voice hearty, but wondered how it really did sound
to cool outsiders. Then he realised humorously, that nobody here was
cool.
Grandma Cherry came in.
In her little bonnet trimmed with lavender velvet, a yet dark curl
shaking on each side her gentle face, where the roses were beginning to
fade, her hand clutching almost convulsively the umbrella she always
rolled up to the most refined attenuation, she might have touched any
heart. She took the chair nearest the door.
“Pull your things off and sit up to the table, Grandma,” said Polly.
Polly knew she was under penalty for this, but could not help it.
For a moment Cherry saw in Polly a boldness of courage he had not
guessed she had.
Grandma Cherry looked like a little girl in size, compared with Polly.
Nan spoke never a word.
She sat staring down at her plate.
Even when Grandma Cherry was given a place at table, she did not speak
or look. The little kitchen felt full of ghosts--ghosts, that brought
sick children crying in their arms, and stirred up three different
sorts of griefs in three different sorts of hearts.
Grandma Cherry ate as an old woman who never forgets that she had seen
gentlemen’s service might eat near a caged lioness, with only a row of
uncertain bars between.
Grandma had not got the reception she had expected from her son’s
letter. But since she was here, with that pluck that had almost
reached the degree of a martyr’s in Aunt Dinah Cherry, and was quite
well-developed in Grandma also, Cherry’s mother decided that before she
left that house Nan should have the piece of her mind which she would
have got that morning fourteen years ago, had the door not been slammed
before she could get her utterance.
Cherry, Polly and Grandma kept up a little running stream of
conversation during tea, and after.
Grandma said she did not intend to stay long.
She began to put on her things.
Then, she stood in the centre of the drab kitchen, futilely trying to
tie her bonnet-strings.
“Nan,” she remarked to the woman who had still not spoken to her, “why
did you do what you did to me that morning?”
It was part of Grandma’s pride that she would not allude to her head
having been banged against the door-cheeks of her own son’s “own house.”
Nan stared across at Grandma.
Then she rose out of her chair, as if a sitting position was untenable
with the attitude of her mind.
“Because,” said the shrew, speaking with a new, yet terrible restraint,
“you said I might well ha’ churchyard luck, for I put my childer into
the grave.”
The charge came forth with a new meaning to Cherry, since he had
witnessed her mood since Rob went away.
She had cared for the children.
She had also--allowed them to die.
She was like a woman who liked plants but couldn’t rear them, because
short of something that would enable her to understand their needs.
“That,” said Grandma, again trying to tie her bonnet-string, “is a lie.”
The two eyed each other.
“You said it to them who said it to me,” said Nan.
Grandma Cherry looked across at her daughter-in-law.
“All that I had to say to you,” she said, in a way that carried its
own conviction, “I said to your face. That morning, when you did as
you did, I came to help you, as I’d have wanted any one to help my own
lass. You had worked on the pit-top, and you were only young. I came
to give you the benefit of my experience. I had buried two myself--the
same way, before I had him,” pointing to Cherry. “I was married young.
So I came to help you. And I also came to say,” she continued, “that I
was sorry for having kept a bit aloof. I had brought myself to the idea
of his having married you. _I had seen I was wrong._ I had seen it as
an old woman sees things, who has not long before she goes to her long
home, and knows that ‘All is vanity.’ And I had come to tell you, Nan.
Whatever anyone told you I had said--that’s the truth and the other was
a lie.” She managed to tie the strings through once, then said shakily,
“_And you did as you did._”
Polly went to her aid and tied the bunches under her chin. Polly’s eyes
were full of tears, too.
Nan’s were staring across at Grandma, vainly trying to convey that she
knew she had been in the right.
The woman who had made the mischief was dead, had been dead ten years.
Nan was wild enough, had she known her resting place, to have ripped
her out of the grave, and strewn her bones over Narrowfield streets.
But she kept up that cover of knowing she had been in the right. She
had not the nobility that is swift to acknowledge and is sorry it has
made a mistake.
In this strained silence of brazen assumption of contempt in Nan, that
contempt which she knew belonged rightly to Grandma Cherry, the old
woman put on her gloves and again seized the refined umbrella.
“Annie,” said Grandma Cherry (and very funny “Annie” sounded as a name
for the shrew) “if you’re willing to let by-gones be by-gones, I am.”
Poor Grandma Cherry, she thought she used diplomacy by speaking as a
defaulter too.
Her little gloved hand was shaking like a leaf as she held it towards
Nan.
The shrew’s face was a study.
Grandma Cherry had not only forgiven having her head banged on the
door-stones, she was--picking up where she had left off fourteen years
ago. She was wanting to be friends.
Whiter and whiter went Nan’s face.
Then--her voice came rough with passion after Grandma’s gentle voice.
So rough and agitated was it that the tone was exactly as though some
one invisible was trying to strangle her.
“I’d sooner,” said Nan, “spit in your eye.”
Thus did Nan find it hardest of all to forgive Grandma Cherry for being
innocent of that she had nursed against her for fourteen years.
“Very well, Nan,” said Grandma.
Polly closed the door after her, very gently, when she was quite at
the top of the street. It seemed like closing the door on a pathetic,
little human-faced saint in a home-made bonnet with lavender-velvet
bows.
Cherry sat with the mixed feelings of a man who isn’t quite sure
whether he has made a mess of it or pioneered the way to something
better, at least. Grandma had robbed Nan of the illusion she had been
nursing fourteen years. But whether parting with a grievance made
things better or worse Cherry could not tell. Women were beyond his
computations. They always did the thing you least reckoned on.
Polly was undecided whether or not to go to church.
When three-quarters of an hour had passed, and Nan showed signs of
making an attack on Cherry, the reflection that she had half-promised
Peter to walk with him after church, and the fact that she had on her
new dress, swayed her decisively.
She left her parents sitting one on each side the hearth, in the way
that Cherry sometimes sarcastically referred to as the Darby and Joan
style.
Polly had a glorious triumph that night.
The minister introduced her to a man who had come ten miles to hear her
sing, and who said warmly that to hear her sing as she did, did him
more good than all the sermons in the world. He hoped she would have a
wonderful future.
What was more to Polly, she had a wonderful walk, with a wonderful
moon in a blue velvet sky, and Peter telling her how beautiful she
was--whilst all the time, if he had only known, she was trying to
believe that he was Adam Wild. Becky walked in front with the youth of
the receding chin.
Polly tripped lightly down the street after nine o’clock, glad to
hear as she entered it, nothing but the strains of a wheezy harmonium
playing “Lead Kindly Light.” All was serene, as her Dad had used to
say in the old days, when he was six foot one, and cracked jokes, and
stood about, with his hand on his heart, and one arm outstretched,
singing to Nan, “I don’t know why I love you, but I do,” winding up
with some kind of dance which he said was “the serpentine” but which
looked more like a bear’s.
One or two women were standing in the little door-ways. She thought
they looked at her with the sort of interest usually bestowed on her,
after “the street had been up.” It quickened her pace. She almost ran
down to their own door.
Entering, she hung up her coat in the passage, then went towards the
kitchen.
It was as she reached the threshold of a kitchen full of shadows and
faint reflections from the moon, that a groan broke on her ears.
Immediately, she stopped, palpitant.
Had her Dad lost all restraint, and killed her Mam?
“Dad!” she ejaculated.
Then she half stumbled over a chair, and gave a faint shriek.
Which caused the second groan to fall on her ears.
It was in her Dad’s voice.
Quite suddenly, the panic in Polly’s heart passed from that which makes
one to shake into the deeper panic which must find the matches--and
_see_. She found them at last. Her hands were pieces of ice. The
matches broke off. Then she struck them on the wrong side of the box.
At last she found the lamp, lit it, and put on the glass.
She found him, laid on the floor, jammed between wash-boiler and his
chair, which had been pushed aside in the struggle. There was blood.
It made her sick. There was a lot of blood. Everything was spinning
round now, for Polly. She wanted to scream, and scream and scream. But
a hard, cold something would not let her.
“Dad!” she said.
He opened his eyes and saw Polly.
“I--didn’t hit--her----” he said dogmatically.
Then Polly saw what had done it.
The one knife in the house that would cut lay near.
“Do you think you are killed, Dad?” asked Polly, despairingly.
There was a brief silence.
Then--Cherry laughed.
“I’ve bled a lot,” he said. “Been here a hundred thousand years.”
He tried to raise himself up on his elbow.
“Ooo, Dad,” said Polly, “what a lot of----”
She shuddered again.
“About five stitches it’ll need,” said Cherry, dreamily. “I
looked--then I lost the matches.”
He rolled over dazedly again.
When he recovered again, he saw Polly’s face.
She had been thinking harder than ever she had done in her life.
“Attempted murder” for her mother--or “attempted suicide” for her Dad.
Neither would do.
But she was not strong-charactered enough to act on her own initiative.
She managed to make Cherry understand, and give his assent to her plan.
He wondered at her cleverness, in the way men wonder about things under
the half-spell of an anæsthetic.
It seemed hours before she came again, after the dull sound of the door
closing behind her.
“Well, what have you been trying to do to yourself?”
The words were spoken with a strong Irish accent.
The lamp was set down on the floor. It half blinded Cherry. He vaguely
saw a young man, and guessed that this was the young, new doctor who
had last week pulled Polly a tooth, and whom she had selected, with
feminine cunning as most likely to keep his mouth shut, since he was a
new doctor, just starting a practice.
Cherry lived up to the plan Polly had consulted him about. He murmured
about life not being worth the living--and it was so near to his
belief, just at present, that the young doctor never questioned but
that Cherry had been trying to commit suicide. When he was got on his
chair, Polly set the lamp near, and the young man put in the stitches,
after Cherry had promised that he would _never_, however he was
tempted, do it again.
Polly’s teeth chattered as she beheld the operation.
Cherry made no sound.
The doctor was a little astonished.
For a degenerate, Cherry had stood it well.
“More blood than anything,” said the doctor.
“But if it doesn’t go on all right, let me know at once, else I’d get
in a devil of a hole.” He helped get Cherry to bed.
Then went out wondering why on earth he had promised the girl who had
held his sleeve in the little waiting-room not to tell what her father
had done, but to come to him. He had promised. But he was uneasy.
He decided that, hearing nothing for a few days, he would consider all
was well.
Polly, meanwhile, got her Dad food and drink.
Cherry was drowsy.
“What about the door?” quoth Polly.
“Leave it unlocked,” he said.
They were both thinking of the shrew.
Where she had gone they could not guess.
Polly piled up the fire.
She settled herself for the night.
But the shrew did not come.
Polly sent word that she could not come to work next day. Cherry was
very weak.
It was on the third day that he made the resolve to get out from that
street, that house, that town. When Nan did come back she should find
them gone. It was not that he had the intention of putting her away
from him for good and all. But, for the nonce, he was tired. Within
a week it was all settled. Moreover, he managed to sell the newly
started business “as a going concern.” Granny Harker had been written
to. She only knew that Nan had left him. She answered that she had
taken a house for him, suited to his needs. Cherry was going to start a
fent-business and Clothing Club in Cherrydale, centre of a half-dozen
villages that had to go to town for such things. He was setting up
house with Polly.
Now that Nan had not come back for so long, he guessed that pride was
keeping her away.
Perhaps, he thought, she was waiting for him to fetch her back, seek
her out.
The thought made him smile.
Nan was a habit.
But a habit that he could temporarily give up, with very little
inconvenience.
At least, such were his opinions as he followed the lorry that bore
their household goods, on the road that ran to Cherrydale, where there
was more scope for a fent-dealer, and more air. Polly he could see,
perched up on the bedding on the lorry, her face every now and then
turning towards the driver. She was flirting her way into Cherrydale.
Quite suddenly, he saw her start and grow demure.
Coming along the road was a milk-cart and a brown pony. Holding the
reins was a handsome young man who was whistling, but broke off to look
up at the girl on the throne of the bedding. He lifted his cap.
“Now, he’d a good head on him,” called Cherry, from behind the lorry.
Polly laughed.
Her Dad _would_ discuss the shapes of men’s heads as if they were
Airedales.
He was going to ask her who the young man was, when, coming to meet
them, in her bonnet with the geranium looking redder than ever, was
Granny. She stood full in the middle of the road.
“Welcome to Cherrydale,” she cried. Then, “I know where _she_ is.
Sh--she’s all reight. Nowt ever happens to nowt. I’ll tell you,
_after_.”
She winked, looking significantly at the driver, to tell Cherry it was
too public a place to discuss Nan in, here. The driver winked back at
her.
“Na, then. Noan o’ that. We don’t allow it here,” said Granny solemnly.
And everybody laughed.
Then, she pointed a fat finger towards the hills.
“Sitha!” she said to her son-in-law. “Th’ good owd rainbow. Tha mun
take that as a good omen.”
She led the way to a lane that turned from the main road, and climbed
up a hill. There, on the summit of the hill, just sufficiently removed
from the hill-path to be out of way of dust, was a house--a whitewashed
house, with a real porch whose top was cushioned with golden moss, and
with a garden back and front. Granny told Cherry the price. He whistled.
“It’s hardly,” said Granny solemnly, “the price of the rosydandrum
there, in the garden.”
She took out the key and handed it to Polly.
Polly unlocked the door, giggling and important.
Then, remembering, she came back and helped her Dad through the
doorway, into a place smelling of new whitewash--into a kitchen with
mullioned windows, deep sills, and a window-seat.
In the corner was a man’s big chair.
Cherry stared at this.
“It were _his_,” said Granny Harker, in the tone she only used when
referring to the Primrose Leaguer. “It’s no good anybody falling out
about who has _that_, when I can’t say a word for mysel’. So I had it
fetched up, Will. Here, mon,” she shouted to the driver from the door,
“come an’ give a hand.”
He came. They lifted Cherry into Pa Harker’s chair.
Then Granny took off her bonnet and set to work.
“If there’s owt I enjoy now and again,” she remarked as she fetched and
carried, “it’s a flitting. Now, thee--lie back an’ take it cool.”
Cherry smiled.
But--it hurt to have to sit back.
He had left the drab house.
But he had not left himself.
There was one thing, though.
Here, in Cherrydale, he started in a house without the old, sad, bad
memories. Here, in Cherrydale, he had not to live down the man who had
been six foot one. Here, in Cherrydale, he started without Nan. It
wouldn’t be for long, possibly. But if she had to sue to come back,
Nan was un-Nanned. Never again would it be the same.
She would have admitted the dominion of the mere male. He did not ask
any questions about her. Like Granny, he knew that she was all right.
Nan wasn’t the sort they made angels of.
As he watched Granny and Polly together, the idea came to him that
Granny might make a woman of Polly.
He decided, soon, to ask her about it.
Meanwhile, he watched the old things from the drab house going up on
those new white walls, made rosy by a fire roaring in a wide chimney
that let down its black throat shafts of sunlight, and the twitterings
of birds.
Here, in the country, the furniture looked all right.
There, in the town, it had looked all wrong.
He began to wonder why they had stuck to the old, sad house so long.
Myrtle Cottage, Thomas Hill, was high up.
For the first time Cherry knew what the Psalmist meant when he spoke of
the feet being set on a hill.